Nielsen is going beyond tracking what you watch to tracking all of your purchases as well. Linking TV viewers to their individual purchases has been available to packaged-goods marketers for a few years now, but Nielsen is now making this data available to telecom, restaurant, travel, entertainment, financially services and almost all retail advertisers, according to Adage. Senior VP Global Product Leader of Nielsen Buyer Insights said that this tracked data represents over $37 billion in transactions, $4 trillion in sales and $10 billion in advertising spending annually. This doesn’t mean Nielsen sees absolutely everything you buy, but they can see what TV viewers buy on an aggregated level.

Nielsen has an exclusive alliance that provides data on a near-census level. Nielsen is the first research company that has this data currently. This doesn’t mean that advertisers will shift to purchased-based program ratings, but this is quite an insight into what advertising research may look like in the future or near future.